A few things actually.

I’ve been working up reimplementations of Nikoli puzzles to host on my personal blog, the goal is to work through the maths and then explain how it’s relevant or helps create a fun games. Nikoli is the magazine that helped create sudoku and made it famous - they have a lot of other pen and paper puzzles that are really fun to play.

I’ve also got two other open source tools I’ve built to help me work daily:

https://tajd.github.io/cofferdam/ which is a rust based cli tool I wrote to parse the ast of codebase and enforce architectural preferences - eg don’t reimplement design system for components down to DRY

https://tajd.github.io/projektor/ Is an ai native project management tool where I can plan work on the train and then have my agents pick it up autonomously. Bootstrapped it quickly but then have been incrementally adding more functionality to it. It’s like self hosted jira on cloudflare but much faster and has more agentic development tools. I added tooling around being able to autonomously work through epics, manage quality and fix identified bugs - https://tajd.github.io/projektor/agents/playbooks/epic-goal/. The goal being deliver useful features and then to ultimately surface the number of bugs identified by agents and users so that I can see the health of the project and figure out if I need to write more code myself or improve feature descriptions to reduce discovered bugs. I don’t think this is new at all but it’s reliable and done well, I hope.

For the past four months, I've been building a window manager for MacOS based on my 2009 concept video 10/GUI.

I've overcome about a dozen "there's simply no way to do this in MacOS and I have to abandon the project" challenges so far. MacOS really does not want to let you manage windows in this novel of a way, and I've had to come up with a handful of tricks to maintain the illusion that the WM is accessing the compositor at a lower level than it actually is. But it works, and I'm dogfooding it as I go!

I'm hopefully only a few weeks away now from a full announcement and a beta. If you're curious to try the first beta, feel free to get in touch at clayton at presteign dot com.

Working on an open-source alternative to Loom/Jam/Birdie/Screendesk

It captures the screen recording along with console logs, network requests, and session activity so you can get to the root cause faster

https://github.com/0xnyn/userplane

I've been building https://promptship.dev for a while now. Basically a cloud where the operators are the agents not the humans. The platform allows agents to attach DBs, clone envs with data (instant prod like env for testing, etc), per-env access tokens for agents, append-only logging/traces for agent actions.

It's been quite useful for our small team and we plan to open this to public beta, soon.

I’m working on The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton, a chess app for Apple platforms:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/mqfhpmHY

This work is motivated for my lifelong love for chess, my passion for Apple hardware and software (not as much as before, sadly), and my frustration of not having an Apple-native app comparable to ChessBase. My disappointment with the trend of recent macOS apps using Electron or other cross-platform frameworks instead of the native toolkits is also a factor. I miss the days when Apple users demanded more from macOS apps.

My aim with MBCA is to create a serious chess app that satisfies the needs of everyone from club players to professionals, with a native Apple look and feel and iCloud sync. Currently the app supports the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. I hope to make a visionOS port later. There is still a lot of work to do, but I’m having a lot of fun developing it, and I already find the current version very useful for my chess training.

The name, in case you wonder, is from a short story by Gene Wolfe, my favorite science fiction author.

Working on a 5 min multiplayer dungeon https://escapethe.app which the kids say “is actually fun”.

And taking a second crack at a feature flags with https://quonfig.com because I seem to be unable to put this problem down and finally feel like I have the right git native and agent first approach.

It’s not as cool as most of the other projects, but I have a little app (Ato on AppStore - https://apps.apple.com/app/ato/id6757285141) for basically tracking all walks/bike rides I’ve ever been and visualize it on a single map. I’ve had the app for a couple of years, but redid it with “hexes”, instead of just routes. It has a bit of coop, competition and ranking feeling to it nowadays as well.

I started the original project as an excuse to learn SwiftUI, then been using it as an excuse to test all the frontier models and etc. to see how much better we’re getting at AI-coding. Kinda fun to see a couple dozen weekly users semi-competing with each other. Obviously nothing big, but the feeling you get seeing someone else use your app is very nice.

An analog telephone line simulator built (almost) entirely in CMOS and through-hole parts. It will be the second of its kind designed entirely in the 21st century, and the first of its kind designed in the 21st century with any hope of other people reproducing it. Think of it like a rudimentary PBX you can build at home, or like a little telephone company that sits on your desk. Either is accurate.

Realized today why my filter circuits weren't working as they should: I screwed up the placement of one capacitor when I moved the design from simulation to schematic. Next post in the series coming soon.

https://hardfault.life/t/tinytelco

I am building this:

https://safetyevidence.org

It is the most comprehensive collection of benchmarks of the safety, ethics, and values of LLMs. I also aggregate sparse safety benchmark scores into a global ranking by optimizing the global ranking to maximize correlation with individual benchmarks.

A modern issue tracker enabling replay for agentic workflows (via board time-travel) and focus on ergonomics (native to the terminal).

https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/